A Tale of Two Cities: COVID-19 and the Emotional Well-Being of Student-Athletes Using Natural Language Processing.

Carter Floyd,Jason Pappas,Susmit S Gulavani,Amy C H Kim,James Du

doi:10.3389/fspor.2021.710289

Carter Floyd, Jason Pappas + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2021.710289

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Abstract

Student-athletes at the Division I institutions face a slew of challenges and stressors that can have negative impacts in eliciting different emotional responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employed machine-learning-based natural language processing techniques to analyze the user-generated content posted on Twitter of Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) student-athletes to study changes in their sentiment as it relates to the COVID-19 crisis, major societal events, and policy decisions. Our analysis found that positive sentiment slightly outweighed negative sentiment overall, but that there was a noticeable uptick in negative sentiment in May and June 2020 in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter protests. The most commonly expressed emotions by these athletes were joy, trust, anticipation, and fear, suggesting that they used social media as an outlet to share primarily optimistic sentiments, while still publicly expressing strong negative sentiments like fear and trepidation about the pandemic and other important contemporary events. Athletic administrators, ACC coaches, support staff, and other professionals can use findings like these to guide sound, evidence-based decision-making and to better track and promote the emotional wellness of student-athletes.

Highlights

Over the year of 2020, a number of challenges and stressors, such as the public health crisis of COVID-19, nationwide racial justice protests in response to acts of police violence and brutality, and psychosocial isolation imposed by mandatory public health restrictions have emerged that could have a severe negative impact on the psychological well-being of collegiate student-athletes
The results of the confusion matrix for the tripartite sentiment analysis indicated that overall the natural language processing model was able to correctly predict 89.38% of the total cases
It should be noted that the emotions of “trust,” “anticipation” accompanied by “joy,” and “fear” were recognized as top emotions conveyed by the student-athletes during the outbreak

Summary

Introduction

Over the year of 2020, a number of challenges and stressors, such as the public health crisis of COVID-19, nationwide racial justice protests in response to acts of police violence and brutality, and psychosocial isolation imposed by mandatory public health restrictions have emerged that could have a severe negative impact on the psychological well-being of collegiate student-athletes. These challenges and stressors can lead to heightened feelings of anger, anxiety, or fear (McGuine et al, 2021; Shepherd et al, 2021).

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